Locomotoring

Today’s story is not about philosophical loneliness, it is about the practical one, the one at cosmic scale.

“Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), as part of Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.” –Wikipedia

In the Pale Blue Dot photo, a medium size 666 x 659 pixels, Earth is less than a pixel (0.12 pixels), suspended in a beam of sunlight. This photo was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, who wanted the Voyager to turn around as it passed Neptune’s orbit and picture earth. He went on to speak about this photo, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Thirty four minutes after that photo in 1990, the Voyager I camera was permanently turned off. Carl Sagan wrote his book Pale Blue Dot in 1994 and he died in 1996 at 62, battling a rare bone marrow disease.

It has taken me 30 years to truly understand what Carl Sagan meant when he said “That’s home”. And that only happened when we found our passion to capture photons from these far off light sources.

Andromeda (M31), Triangulum (M33) and our Milky Way galaxy are part of a local group of 50 or so galaxies with these three being the largest. Of the three, Andromeda is the largest and Triangulum is the smallest. Milky Way has 100-400 billion stars (hard to tell how big you are from the inside?), Andromeda has a trillion stars and Triangulum has 40 billion stars. Lets be conservative in our counting and say a trillion stars between the three, that is 1,000,000,000,000 stars (12 zeros after 1!). Each star comes with a tiny probability of a planet like earth, capable of supporting life. Multiple a very tiny number with a massive one, and chances are, there is at least one other planet with human like life form in this local group. A life form that is capable of non-essential evolutionary tasks like baking cakes, playing lotteries, creating whimsical Rube Goldberg toys, writing sciFi etc etc.

For the last 60 years, “passive” SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has relied on its capability to look for technological waves (aka large antennas that capture photons in frequencies that are not background galactic ones) to find other similar creative minds. For last 10 years, there is an “active” SETI sending messages (aka METI or Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, I think of METI as a bird cooing to attract an extra-terrestrial mate).

So far, there has been cosmic pin drop silence in these extra-terrestrial technological surveys.

The reason appears logical enough and yet I don’t want to believe. The radio waves (and similar) are moving at light speed. We are now seeing how Andromeda looked ~2.5 million years ago. On earth, 2.5 million years ago, human species was just emerging. Our species didn’t really start generating technological signs of advancement until about 200 years ago. If you grant the Big Bang, the evolution on other planets might have started about the same time as ours (give or take some hundred thousand years). Ergo, we will be in cosmic silence for another 2.5 million years (give or take some hundred thousand years).

SETI lost its government funding in 1993 and is now funded by philanthropists. There are hundreds of citizen scientists supporting the mission. I want to believe.

Andromeda was our first successful shoot of deep sky object and it had happened during a short stay at the regenerative Paicines Ranch in September. Earlier that night, the ranch had hosted a star party following a farm-to-table dinner. We were staying at their Cheese Cottage. While this cottage is cute as a button, it didn’t present good sky clearance, So, we were set up by the Pony Barn. It was nearly 9 pm by the time we had got our start. Prior to that trip, our experience with deep sky photography came from watching youTube videos. The previous night was just a brutal battle with the equipment and software and we had lost. But this night, we got our first solid thirty minutes of deep sky footage.

I remember the night well enough. Our mother was visiting us and we had taken the opportunity to bring her with us. From her high rise apartment in Delhi, her view of the surrounding land is remarkably easy on the eye but Delhi’s pollution makes it impossible to see clear skies. She had wanted to see the stars. The previous night, she has stayed with us in the field while we had fidgeted with the gadgets. Eventually, she had tired and had crawled into the car for some warmth. But this night, I had insisted on tucking her in bed after the star party. The “party” had gone on until midnight and we could hear laughter and see the lights from the Garden Cottage, and the Grogan House. But afterwards, we only had howling coyotes as our companions.

Now we are approaching thanksgiving. Last night, we took our first Andromeda photo from our courtyard. We have a new astrophotography setup now, with a real telescope and an astro camera. Soon we will have filters that allow us to take photos from our light polluted suburbia. But nothing will take away the magic of the first shots of Andromeda.

And there will always be the mental quiet that comes with the reminder of cosmic loneliness amidst our trillion or so stars.